President Biden will address the nation with the new strategies on dealing with the Omicron variant this Tuesday. He will likely share his plans of sending out 500 million at-home COVID tests kits to Americans directly to the surge of the transmissible Omicron wave.
According to the Senior Administration Officer White House, Biden will announce the new plans on Tuesday afternoon and will offer assurance to Americans that ‘we know we have the tools to get through this wave, including the new testing component.’
The officials added ‘The President will tell the American people that if they are vaccinated and follow the process that we all know well, especially masking while traveling, they should feel comfortable celebrating Christmas and the holidays,’
According to the Press Brief by the officials, Biden will direct Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to deploy 1,000 military troops to hospitals overwhelmed by the COVID new variant during January and February.
As a part of the plan, the federal government is also planning to announce 20,000 COVID testing sites across the country which is going to start from this week.
Biden will continue the hard talk he initiated last week, where he advised and warned unvaccinated Americans that they would face a significant illness that may cause death. He also urged them to get boosters before the Omicron hit them.
According to Dailymail, the number of daily new infections across the United States is reaching more than 100k with total cases of 51,038,148 individuals with the infections to date.
The U.S. has faced 807,552 deaths since March 2019 where the highest cases were found in New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Delaware, and Hawaii.
According to the administration officials, Biden is planning to share steps that he is going to take against Omicron which include:
– A federal-running testing facility at New York to ease vaccination before Christmas
– 1,000 military medical troops to aid hospitals
– Deploying hospital equipment to deal with the surge
– More medical facilities in states with a higher number of cases.
– Deploying thousands of ambulances to transport patients from one hospital to another.
The Senior Administrator added;
“Because omicron spreads easily, we will see fully vaccinated people get Covid-19. But vaccinated people who get Covid will likely have no symptoms or mild symptoms,” the senior administration official said. “Because of that strong protection, the president will tell the American people if they are vaccinated and follow the process that we all know well, especially masking while traveling, they should feel comfortable celebrating Christmas and holidays.
